Ex-PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi worked from midnight until 5 a.m. as a receptionist to pay for her Yale degree - and she says ‘respect went up’ because of it

When former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi arrived in the U.S. in the late 1970s to study graduate-level management at Yale University , she was a self-described “misfit” from India. Instead of adjusting to the rhythms of college nightlife, Nooyi was working the midnight-to-5 a.m. shift as a dormitory receptionist before heading to class each morning to pay for her degree.

“We worked our tail off because to us, we didn’t come there for the social life—we came there to study and to work hard and to move ahead,” Nooyi recalled in a July interview with former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice , recalling the experiences of her and her fellow classmates from developing countries.

“So the goal we had was very, very clear: study, work hard, get great grades, and somehow land a job,” she added. “That’s all the objective was at that time.”

Paying for an Ivy League degree wasn’t easy, either. At the time, annual tuition was equivalent to about $20,000 in today’s dollars (a far cry from the six-figure tuition costs of today), and her parents told her they couldn’t help her out financially. But eventually, that relentless work ethic inside and outside of the classroom paid off.

“When we got consulting jobs or investment banking jobs, people looked at us and said, ‘Hey, these are brainiacs,’” Nooyi said. “Respect just went up—purely because of the hard work and all the efforts we put in…People realized that this was a grueling experience for us, and they respected us for that.”

Looking back, the overnight shifts and long hours were part of a larger belief as an immigrant: Success wasn’t guaranteed in America, but opportunity was.

“I remember back in the old days people would say they thought the streets might be paved with gold. Maybe they weren’t paved with gold, but they were paved with the possibility of ambition,” she said.

Today, Nooyi has more than a dozen honorary degrees—including from NYU, Duke, and Yale—and sits on the board of Amazon , Honeywell , and Philips . Her net worth is estimated to be roughly $340 million, according to Forbes .

After graduating from Yale in 1980 with a degree in public and private management—a program that predates the school’s MBA —Nooyi began working her way up the corporate ladder. She worked in various management and strategy positions at companies like Johnson & Johnson , Boston Consulting Group , and Motorola before eventually landing at PepsiCo in 1994. By 2001, she was named chief financial officer, and by 2006, CEO.

At the time, women led only about 2% of Fortune 500 companies—and she faced an uphill battle against those questioning if she was up for the challenge.

But she largely proved her naysayers wrong. During her tenure , which lasted until 2018, sales grew 80%, and Nooyi was named the most powerful woman in business by Fortune five years in a row.